"A Committee of Correspondence"

15 April 2014

Deniers of Science By Richard Sale

A critic of Evolution thundered recently: “Scientific observations do not support biological evolution! What about the icons of evolution that have been presented in textbooks for almost 50 years? Don’t these icons support biological evolution? Some of these do show microevolution within species. This type of evolution, even if it permanently points in one direction, is not evolution. It is no more evolution than dog breeding.” (What???) “However, if a dog could be bred into a cat, that would be evolution. Even icons like the peppered moths that were only examples of microevolution, used pinned dead moths on black tree trunks that were not a natural resting place for the moths. Hackle’s embryos, ape-to-man drawings, the horse series, etc.”

The above is taken from a site urging the teaching of Creationism as an alternative to Evolution. That these words are incoherent are not the worst of their faults. Unfortunately, these remarks leave the question of evolution validity or falsehood. Not only are they erroneous, they are misconceived.

A fundamentalist reading of the Bible leads to all sorts of nonsense. In the 19th century, there occurs a belief in the spontaneous life. At one time, people maintained that the sun created crocodiles from the mud of the Nile. Mice were supposed to be created out of piles of old soiled rags. Bluebottle flies had their origin in bad meat. Maggots were created in apples, which is why they at last appeared. U.S. fundamentalists believe this as well. They do think that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

Alas, Louisiana, Tennessee and other states, clearly striving to be in the forefront of every backward movement, are increasing funding for the teaching of “Creationism” in schools there, demonstrating their support for this falsehood by thumping their cave man’s clubs or perhaps enacting animal sacrifices. The problem is that the advocates of Creationism are spiritual and mental primitives. They haven’t evolved at all.

The Creationist folks clearly don’t understand that Evolution is not really a controversy anymore. Evolution is no longer a theory because the debate has long ago moved from biology to chemical analysis. The building up of chemical molecules defines our Life’s beginning. What we have learned from scientists since Darwin is that the cycles of life have a chemical form. Scientists had to do much selfless work to learn how to express the cycles of life in a way that linked them to nature as a whole, and this meant studying chemistry. That’s what the Bible believers get wrong.

In other words, scientific knowledge has moved way, way beyond Alfred Russel (sic) Wallace, and Darwin and Mendel. The blood that flows in our veins is millions and millions of years old. The history of the Earth is interesting to the point of fascination, but the man who solved the mystery of life’s earliest origins was the Frenchman Louis Pasteur who proved the chemical basis of all human life back in 1863, when the French Emperor asked him to solve the question of why wine went bad. Pasteur solved this in two years. He discovered that the wine was a “sea of organisms.” He said, “By some it lives, by some it decays.” What was the most startling of his discoveries was that life could exist without oxygen. He found that no free oxygen existed before Life existed.

After Pasteur, it was chemists, not biologists that began to look at amino acids as the building blocks of human life. When anyone of us moves his or her arm, we rely on something called myogiblin which consists of 120 amino acids. The difference in amino acids between a chimpanzee and a human is a small difference. But between a human and a sheep, the difference of amino acids is much greater. Yet the overwhelming conclusion about our life’s origins is that they have their base in chemistry, in molecules that can replicate. Basic molecules form DNA chains, etc. In fact, our life is controlled by four bases of DNA.

The Earth’s Beginnings

It is perhaps chastening to note that by 8 billion years ago, about two thirds of the history of our universe passed, and it had passed before the creation of the Earth which took place around 4.6 billion years ago. It was around 4.6 billion years ago that a mass the size of Mars crashed into the Earth at 25,000 miles per hour. There was a huge amount of dust that circled us, but our gravity held on to it and out of that dust the Moon was formed. I believe that it was the moon that gave us 24 hour days and seasons. (A lot of the above is still being refined and debated, so please be patient with my mistakes.) So we humans were born out of chaos, collisions, ice ages, volcanic eruptions, and the like. No wonder we are so quarrelsome.

Scientists returned to the beginning, asking, what was the surface of the Earth and what was our atmosphere like? From my own fitful reading, I discovered from reading was that the atmosphere of the Earth was originally a mixture of steam, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, but no free oxygen. A great step forward occurred in 1952 or thereabouts, thanks to a scientist named Steven Miller, who, with a colleague named Harold Urey, bottled up in a flask what they guessed was the Earth’s original atmosphere. Theirs was an experiment intended to simulate the conditions thought at the time to be present on the early Earth, and the experiment tested for the occurrence of our chemical origins of life. Specifically, the experiment tested Alexander Oparin's and J. B. S. Haldane's hypothesis that conditions on the primitive Earth favored chemical reactions that “synthesized organic compounds from inorganic precursors.” (This language for me is a bit like tramping through a dense thicket in the woods and getting lost, but it is interesting nonetheless.)

So Miller bottled up nitrogen, water, methane, ammonia, water, carbon dioxide, and other reducing gases. The mixture turned pink within a day. For days he and Urey subjected their flask to heat, to ultra-violet light, loud noises, trying to simulate the chaotic fury of the Earth’s original atmosphere. This went on for some time, maybe weeks. Suddenly as Miller and Urey looked on, they saw that the pink liquid had suddenly darkened. Their experiment had produced basic amino acids, rudimental protein. The experiment was seen “as the classic experiment of the origin of life.(*)

A Wikipedia entry notes, “After Miller's death in 2007, scientists examining sealed vials preserved from the original experiments were able to show that there were actually well over 20 different amino acids produced in Miller's original experiments. That is considerably more than what Miller originally reported, and more than the 20 that naturally occur in life. Moreover, some evidence suggests that Earth's original atmosphere might have had a different composition from the gas used in the Miller–Urey experiment. There is abundant evidence of major volcanic eruptions 4 billion years ago, which would have released carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen (N2), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere. Experiments using these gases in addition to the ones in the original Miller–Urey experiment have produced more diverse molecules.[8]

There was another man of genius, Leslie Orgel, who also worked with Miller. There is hardly anything about him on his Wikipedia site, but somewhere I had squirreled notes on him back in the 1980s. Orgel was a Brit, breathtakingly brilliant, and he used ice as a research tool to discover more about the basic elements of air. Freezing things was a way of concentrating them. He froze ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, methane, and some other elements of the atmosphere. He produced amino acids, but he produced something else too something much more important. He produced one of the four constituents of the genetic alphabet, which directs all life. He had in fact discovered adenine, one of the four bases of DNA. He ended by forming organic molecules, a big advance of our understanding.

I did find note of other achievements of his. “During the 1970s, Orgel suggested reconsidering the panspermia hypothesis, according to which the earliest forms of life on earth did not originate here, but arrived from outer space with meteorites.

His name is popularly known because of Orgel's rules, credited to him, particularly Orgel's Second Rule: "Evolution is cleverer than you are."

I am slowly realizing that the ability to analyze a batch of facts requires a certain kind of reasoning. It requires the talent of absorbing an abstraction. To be astute means we have to be a good observer. J.S. Mill once said “The observer is not he who merely sees the thing which is before his eye, but he who sees that parts the thing is composed of.” Someone like me, sees a fact or make an observation, but I don’t realize its particularity. I get only a very general and inadequate view, a hazy gist of the thing. I don’t detect similarities to other observations. But the scientist breaks up the observation and notices the particular attributes of it. He suddenly sees what the rest of us don’t – that the observation has properties which the original, basic observation didn’t have.

I really think that the dedication, the colossal capacity for focused effort, the self-effacing patience, the subordination of the appetite for glory in the service of solid achievement, the building of the powers of analysis in order to define a problem by breaking it down into its simplest elements, then testing a combination of them under different circumstances so something substantial can be proved -- that is and was – nothing short of a miracle to me. And I cannot imagine that God could not help but feeling affection and admiration for the intelligence in the creatures He created.

In the end, science is a test of temperament and mind that underlies a culture. Creationism fails that test.

(*) UPDATED KNOWLEDGE “Originally it was thought that the primitive secondary atmosphere contained mostly ammonia and methane. However, it is likely that most of the atmospheric carbon was CO2 with perhaps some CO and the nitrogen mostly N2. In practice gas mixtures containing CO, CO2, N2, etc. give much the same products as those containing CH4 and NH3 so long as there is no O2. The hydrogen atoms come mostly from water vapor. In fact, in order to generate aromatic amino acids under primitive earth conditions it is necessary to use less hydrogen-rich gaseous mixtures. Most of the natural amino acids, hydroxyacids, purines, pyrimidines, and sugars have been made in variants of the Miller experiment.[citation needed]

More recent results may question these conclusions. The University of Waterloo and University of Colorado conducted simulations in 2005 that indicated that the early atmosphere of Earth could have contained up to 40 percent hydrogen—implying a much more hospitable environment for the formation of prebiotic organic molecules. The escape of hydrogen from Earth's atmosphere into space may have occurred at only one percent of the rate previously believed based on revised estimates of the upper atmosphere's temperature.[23] One of the authors, Owen Toon notes: "In this new scenario, organics can be produced efficiently in the early atmosphere, leading us back to the organic-rich soup-in-the-ocean concept... I think this study makes the experiments by Miller and others relevant again." Outgassing calculations using a chondritic model for the early earth complement the Waterloo/Colorado results in re-establishing the importance of the Miller–Urey experiment.[24]”

In chemistry, a radical (more precisely, a free radical) is an atom, molecule, or ion that has unpaired valence electrons or an open electron shell, and therefore may be seen as having one or more "dangling" covalent bonds.

With some exceptions, these "dangling" bonds make free radicals highly chemically reactive towards other substances, or even towards themselves: their molecules will often spontaneously dimerize or polymerize if they come in contact with each other. Most radicals are reasonably stable only at very low concentrations in inert media or in vacuum.

A notable example of a free radical is the hydroxyl radical (HO•), a molecule that is one hydrogen atom short of a water molecule and thus has one bond "dangling" from the oxygen. Two other examples are the carbene molecule (:CH
2), which has two dangling bonds; and the superoxide anion (•O−
2), the oxygen molecule O
2 with one extra electron, which has one dangling bond. On the other hand, the hydroxyl anion (HO−
), the oxide anion (O2−
) and the carbenium cation (CH+
3) are not radicals, since the bonds that may appear to be dangling are in fact resolved by the addition or removal of electrons.

Free radicals may be created in a number of ways, including synthesis with very dilute or rarefied reagents, reactions at very low temperatures, or breakup of larger molecules. The latter can be affected by any process that puts enough energy into the parent molecule, such as ionizing radiation, heat, electrical discharges, electrolysis, and chemical reactions. Indeed, radicals are intermediate stages in many chemical reactions.

Free radicals play an important role in combustion, atmospheric chemistry, polymerization, plasma chemistry, biochemistry, and many other chemical processes. In living organisms, the free radicals superoxide and nitric oxide and their reaction products regulate many processes, such as control of vascular tone and thus blood pressure. They also play a key role in the intermediary metabolism of various biological compounds. Such radicals can even be messengers in a process dubbed redox signaling. A radical may be trapped within a solvent cage or be otherwise bound.

Until late in the 20th century the word "radical" was used in chemistry to indicate any connected group of atoms, such as a methyl group or a carboxyl, whether it was part of a larger molecule or a molecule on its own. The qualifier "free" was then needed to specify the unbound case. Following recent nomenclature revisions, a part of a larger molecule is now called a functional group or substituent, and "radical" now implies "free". However, the old nomenclature may still occur in the literature.

I have somewhat mixed view on this, since I actually deal with public opinion research, specifically with regards to science.

What we actually know is that, while we (Americans are relatively ignorant of science, ignorance is mostly function of education and income (obv, these two are linked) rather than politics. With regards evolution, the state of "knowledge" with regards basic facts are roughly the same given education for liberals and conservatives, fundies and atheists. The difference is that conservatives often don't "believe" them while liberals do.

In terms of "science," both are wrong at a fundamental level: scientists don't "believe," at least when they do science. They only draw conclusions that can be supported by logic and data. If the data contradicts their conclusion and its reliability is indisputable, the scientist has to drop the conclusion. Nothing in science has the validity to override good data that contradicts it, whether it is evolution, gravity, or democracy. If one pretends that some idea is better than the data, that is a cargo cult, not science.

One service that Bill Nye rendered for science education by debating that creationist fellow in Kentucky was that he laid out what kind of evidence would be needed to convince Him of creationism, while his opponent could only repeat that he unconditionally believes in creationism. This is the contrast between real science and a cargo cult. Science is always ready to bow to the facts if they are indisputable. A cargo cult equivocates, twists logic, and makes excuses to not accept inconvenient facts. Notwithstanding being on the right side on evolution, how many of the people who say they "believe" evolution are not themselves cargo cultists in their outlook? The way we react to world events makes me wonder how many people there are in this country that do not subscribe to any major cargo cult somewhere.

I have been watching the new "Cosmos" on Hulu. I have not always loved N D Tyson's work, as some of the shows I have seen him on were kind of, well, crappy.

I am coming to like him more and more, especially the facial expression and tone he uses when invoking "god" as the pre-scientific explanation for things, which he describes as foreclosing any further questions.

I was nostalgic for Carl Sagan at first, but really, no more. CS did not actually have to defend science back in the 70's from those how do not understand the difference between the internal world of a person, which religion addresses pretty well, and the world external to a person, which science describes much more accurately. Apparently, Mr. Tyson does feel that need, and good for him and thanks.

Religion comes up with less than perfectly effective ways of dealing with externals, like cancer or climate, and science gives us some pretty crappy and heartless moral codes. It's that driving screws with a hammer thing, again.

Richard, to begin with please define speciation and how it occurs in nature.

There is a large, large, LARGE gulf between Young Earth Creationism and Evolution. It is not one or the other. I'll try to be polite here by saying you've built yourself a cute strawman to wail on, at best.

There are major gaps in the dominant Darwinian Evolution as propagandized by it proponents.

Those are:

origin of life,
speciation (think of the evolution of man, or flowering plants),
species stability - why sea turtles have remained stable for over 200 million years
species extinction (dinosaurs became extinct but mammals survived)

Largely, they feed you words and plausible scenarios - a species of fables now dressed in a more modern jargon.

One of the most offensive ones has been evolutionary psychology - a pseudo-science par excellence - if there ever was one.

I do not think that the existence of such gaps in knowledge discredits the Darwinian Evolution as such if its scope is more narrowly defined that some of its more emotional supporters.

After all, science is a never-ending quest and one would discover new scientific puzzles as older ones are resolved.

But the supporters of Darwinian Evolution seem to be a very insecure lot with very thin skins - it seems to me. They see a religious fanatic behind every bush and tree - who is waiting to burn them at the stake.

They do not have the moral or scientific courage to admit that there are major gaps in their narrative and people are free to read God or Providence into those gaps (however undesirable that might be in certain circles)

If you have time, please take a look at this science-fiction novel which thoroughly debunks atheistic scientism in its early chapters:

I think part of the problem is a misapplication of the "faith v. reason" argument.

Religion is a matter of faith. Science is a matter of reason.

Both faith and reason are great and legitimate traditions. Much of modern science arose out of the tension between faith and reason.

Men of reason, scientists for example, can have a great deal of religious faith. And men of faith, religious believers for example, can have a great deal of reason.

The problem arises when attempts are made to interpret religious faith in terms of reason, in other words to explain religion in terms of science (the earth is 6000 years old according to the bible, for example) and, also, when science is interpreted in terms of faith.

It's akin to interpreting apples in terms of oranges.

Walk down the halls of a college. Knock on the door of a scientist and ask him if he can "prove" God's existence scientifically. While he might well be religious, he would most likely tell you that particular "proof" is not within his purview or skill set, that it's a matter of faith.

Continue down the hall and ask a theologian whether or not he believes in God since science hasn't "proven" it, he would most likely laugh and say as well that it's a matter of faith, not reason.

I would consider speciation to be a widely agreed and practical paradigm imposed on the fossil and anthropologist record to attempt further analysis of Creation's organizing principles, a cargo cult if you must, but one yet awaiting discovery of a fossil a man riding a dinosaur by its detractors.

One of the problems that I had encountered doing public opinion research on this is that many people who are on the "right" side of evolution are different from creationists only in that they "believe" the "right" answer, not so much that they "understand" it better. Yes, they may be on the right side on evolution, but they also believe a lot of pseudosciences too. (This shows up again when you start surveying people on their beliefs on climate change: many people who say they "believe in" seriousness of climate change tend to mix up climate change and other environmental issues, some true but unrelated, others completely bunk pseudoscience. The number of people who say ozone and climate change are related among self-identified "environmentalists" is stunning.)

The real challenge seems to be that people, regardless of political stripes, just don't know what "science" is, that it is not just matter of believing things and having opinions on things. They don't understand that science does not tell people to do moral things, but simply consists of logical conclusions drawn from data, regardless of what they think the world should be like. I tend to think this is borne from the same mindset as the "shapers of history" who imagine themselves free of facts about the world. Not too many people are equally skeptical of BHO as they were of GWB--the people who gather here represent the rare exception. Many who imagined themselves part of "reality-based community" vis-a-vis Bush have jumped into a different reality once BHO came into office. I see the same forces driving them as those who pride themselves for "believe in" evolution but rant about (scientifically unsubstantiated) ill effects of genetically modified crops (for the record, there may be many good reasons, including economic ones, for being concerned with GMO crops, but there is hardly any evidence that they cause illness or such, at least not yet.).

Well my point was that I don't think its..shall we say wise to declare that anyone who disagrees with evolution is against science when something like speciation and its definitions are so variable and fuzzy.

I'd say Sale's essay is a good example of Science as Religion and the lack of thinking that goes with that outlook.

In other words there's no call for the smug tut tutting by Dawkins and his ilk followed by the tempore tantrums when someone points out the unanswered questions in evolution. Evolution is hardly this towering fortress of unassaliable logic that its high priests imagine it to be.